Synthetic marijuana [laced with fentanyl, reportedly]… confirmed as cause of New Haven overdoses

Hawk, an Emergency Department physician with Yale New Haven Hospital, said that the drug that caused the overdoses was K2* laced with fentanyl.

*K2 “a big potpourri” of potentially dangerous drugs. “There’s so much garbage that’s being sold and you can call it whatever you want to call it. Even the drug dealers don’t know.” -Dr. Sten Vermund

Dr. Sten Vermund, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, said that by calling K2 “synthetic marijuana,” “in some ways you’re doing a disservice to marijuana, because it’s not nearly as potent.” “The generic term is synthetic marijuana compounds, but I find that to be misleading,” he said. The synthetic compounds “have potential for a wide variety of side effects,” he said. He called K2 “a big potpourri” of potentially dangerous drugs. “There’s so much garbage that’s being sold and you can call it whatever you want to call it. Even the drug dealers don’t know.” Vermund said the opioid epidemic “has been fueling a lot of this. … People who are opioid addicted — they need to get high. Sometimes they’re not even wanting to get high. They just want to avoid going into withdrawal. “We’ve seen the overdoses in the heroin-using community … by the thousands,” Vermund said, with opioid addiction rising from 400,000 in the late 1970s to 2.6 million now. “We’re in a new normal. This is a very serious time,” he said. “It’s a very serious crisis.”

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